The presidential election in the US is now mere weeks away. As AI-generated deepfakes become increasingly realistic, it’s very likely that we’ll be faced with a lot more AI-generated misinformation. A new public service announcement about celebrity deepfakes aims to tackle that.
RepresentUs organized the campaign, which debuted on Oct. 22. It featured the likenesses of numerous celebrities like Rosario Dawson, Jonathan Scott, Laura Dern, Michael Douglas, and Amy Schumer. But only some of them are real.
The clip features the stars, explaining some of the most common deepfakes you will likely encounter. This includes misinformation like voting time, documentation, and location. “These are all scams designed to trick you into not voting,” the celebrities say. “Don’t fall for it.”
The majority of celebrities in the video were revealed to be deepfakes at the end of the clip.
The filmmakers obtained permission from these actors to use their likenesses to warn people about the ease of mistaking deepfakes for actual footage.
“We’re not going to stop this from coming into existence,” Miles Taylor, one of the campaign organizers, told NBC.
“But what we can do is make people aware that this is the new spam, that this is going to be the type of thing they see all the time online that tries to deceive them, and to make sure that they don’t fall for that deception, especially in a critical period of democratic transition.”
